OF GHOSTS AND WOLVES
by Daughter of solace
Summary: Where Harry Potter's life had been on the strange side of normal, her's jumped the line with a hop, skip, and a jump over the insanity line... If she knew anything about how she came to be, she'd blame it on stupid in the genes. (This might jump ratings in the near future.)
1. Chapter 1: Death to Normalacy

Harry Potter sat in his office, the four foot by twelve foot prison only large enough to house a desk and the small spinning chair that Ginny gave him as a gag gift last year. Before shit hit the fan.

He sighed as he slumped forward over the massive amounts of paperwork (filled with questions such as: Time, Place, Reason for Dispute, Magical leanings, and, for some strange reason-he suspected Hermione was behind it-the presence of magical creatures) that theoretically had to be done ASAP. His fingers ran nervously through the graying curtain of black hair as he thought about the way his life had unexpectedly started to deteriorate even as he rose admirably through the ranks of Aurors and gained unwarranted, unwanted prestige as the man who finally beat Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody's record for most captured but least killed.

Ginny Potter, his wife, up and left him at the end of last month-taking all of his children-with her, refused to let him see them, immediately informed him that she two-timed him for eight years with Dean Thomas, and that a divorce was forth coming. When he'd begged, pleaded and attempted to connive with his mother-and-law to see the children, Ginny had stomped up to him, wove her wand in his face, threatened him and finally broke.

According to her, Lily hadn't even been his child having been conceived during a rather raucous three way between Dean and his life partner Seamus Finnigan. She had gotten so close to his face that their noses touched as she snarled how that had been the most aroused she'd ever been before describing the encounter in vivid detail. He remembered being rather more preoccupied that her face had gone charmingly red and made the mistake of telling her so.

He smiled as he remembered how she spluttered to a stop, before he asked her why she was doing this to him. She had shoved him several paces back because he'd gone to tuck a string of hair behind her ear where it had escaped from her pony-tail. He could see the children behind her in two of the Burrow's lowest windows as her eyes narrowed in rage.

"Because," She had screamed at him, "Because you are so stupidly self-involved that everything you touch breaks, because you've always wanted to touch me but wanted to keep me from self-destructing- don't you even dare try and deny it Potter, I saw it in your eyes-because all I've ever wanted was your money... Not because I've ever loved anyone as much of a spoiled brat as you..." He had taken a step back as if he'd been slapped. She continued and moved forward as she brandished her wand. "Then there's your drinking problem. And the fact that you named all of the children that I'd carried in my womb after dead people and that your hair never behaves. Because it was all your fault that every single member of your family and half of the wizarding population are dead and..."

Harry put his head in his hands again. He remembered the rage that had filled him as he turned on the spot and apparated away from the premises with the feeling of having just been punched in the stomach by something that resembled a large battering ram. He'd appeared at some strange hill-side that he vaguely remembered from the Horcrux Hunt Fiasco to keep himself from either starting a duel or yelling back at his wife. He hadn't wanted the kids to see him loose his temper.

He sighed as he ran a hand through his hair and then returned to his paper work as resigned as he could possibly be. Work wasn't cutting it lately. As much as Ginny would have loved to claim a workaholic problem, his job wasn't his main purpose in life... Yet again, he wasn't sure if even _he_ knew what his purpose was. The adventures of his job staled from exposure and the helplessness of the jobs he worked (mostly homicide, missing persons, and abuse cases) invaded his soul with the corrosive poison of survivors guilt. Especially, as this month tended to be one of the worst for him.

Since his school days, May gave him nothing but pain. Quirell in first year, the Basilisk, the Dementors and time turner, then Cedric and the Graveyard, Sirius, Dumbledore, and (perhaps the worst of it) the entirety of the next year: May never gave him pleasant dreams. All it did, it seemed, was bring him pain and loss. He rummaged in through the bottom drawer of his desk.

At least, Ron and Hermione found solace in each other. They'd married, had their two point five children, and lived very well for their salaries. He often wondered how they'd done it, but he knew not to ask. The superior pitying looks would come back, and he wondered vaguely if they were also making money off of him. He didn't want to know. They, at least, went through a lot of the things that he had and stayed with him despite his upcoming divorce, his problems after the war, Teddy.

He took a deep breath as he dragged out the small bottle of Firewhiskey from his desk; he set it on the top of fifty different reports he had yet to finish that all looked the same. Harry took to buying small bottles of the stuff because he knew if he brought the large ones to work he would be under the influence more often than not. Teddy would probably kill him if he found out about this stash and Harry wasn't quite sure if he wanted to be proud he raised such a good kid, or annoyed that he now had another baby-sitter. Most of the time, he was pleased.

Often, Hermione asked him about how he felt and whether he was getting enough sleep (she relished when she was able to use the stuff she had learned at muggle University about Psychology, or something that sounded like that) or would get Ron would take him out for a drink so that the two of them could talk. He appreciated it, most of the time, as the chronic self-hate generally impeded the work he did and made it hard for him to continue when he constantly wondered if he had done the right thing by coming back.

To top most of his anxiety, something-or someone-kept breaking into Grimauld Place.

After the war, he refused to live there-though he occasionally visited while Kreacher had been alive, but that was some years ago-because the house convinced Harry that Sirius still haunted the rooms of the place as he had in life. The thought tended to be more bitter than sweet.

But Harry wanted to make sure that Mundungus Fletcher refused to come to the place. A small smile grew on his face as he remembered one of the many times he threatened the thief and it made him feel just slightly better.

Despite his dislike of the air when he visited, the house still belonged to him and he supposed he wanted to make sure that James inherited something that meant a great deal to him. (James liked the thought of living in someplace that held significance to one of his namesakes and the fact that it was haunted simply made it better. Harry often wondered whether the genes of being impossible skipped a generation.) So, keeping his inheritance safe seemed to be one of the more important things lately since Harry wanted to do right by at least one of his children.

Last week's annual visit showed him recently disrupted dust footprints through the foyer, a slept in bed in the room theoretically still belonging to Sirius, and more rat skeletons than he remembered from his last visit. But he couldn't find the intruder, even with the skills that he'd lately gained from his job. So he set up sensory spells to see if the intruder returned, with the thought of trapping them. He cast his eye toward the clock on his desk which told time, the locations of all his children, and happened to be the thing he tied an alarm to the sensory spells.

The intruder had yet to return. He sighed and replaced the Firewhiskey back where it belonged. Harry had a sneaking suspicion they would return tonight. Besides, he wasn't the only one in the Auror office tonight.

"Potter."

"Speak of the Devil and he shall appear," Harry thought glumly as he returned his quill to the large stack of reports and scratched a little bit more into the parchment's surface. The only other person in the office descended upon him and he decided to ignore him as long as possible.

"Potter... Potter!" The voice called again.

Harry slowly turned his head toward the source and distinctly wished he was somewhere else. Tahiti, maybe.

The Head Auror stood over him and glared at him from his place by the door of Harry's cubicle. He was taller than Harry with a significantly messy honey blond head that looked quite different from his—accomplishing the impression that he'd just been shagged rather than had stuck his finger into an electrical socket—and his face looked sharp though more dainty than the usual pure blood male.

"Scamander," Harry said as he returned to his work. He often wondered whether he made the wrong decision when he refused the job last September, and the September before that.

This prat, while previously married to his late friend Luna Lovegood, tended to be one of the worst that he served under in his 17 years in the Auror department. He could have handled blatant favoritism or dislike (in this case, the feeling would have been mutual), but Rolf Scamander micromanaged everything. It reminded him vaguely of what he imagined the teachers at Hogwarts faced during the reign of Dolores Umbridge.

"Have you finished the reports on the Xenophilius Amourwell case yet?" Scamander phrased most of his demands as questions, though Harry couldn't really be surprised about the nature of this particular question.

Three weeks ago, Luna Scamander nee' Lovegood had been found murdered in her kitchen beside a bloody kettle that at one point held the tea of the Plimpies. Despite his practice at seeing dead bodies, Harry almost threw up when asked to begin an investigation and he saw his school friend on the checkered laminate floor.

She was beaten bloody, bruises littered both her face and shoulders that could barely be seen underneath the now matted, bloodied blonde hair. Marks that looked like bites lined her legs and issued puddles of blood onto the multicolored skirts that Luna loves... Loved... wearing. Some of the damage seemed spell created, like the partially healed lacerations on her back, but the rest seemed to be similar to some of the cases he remembered from the few times he had gone out on the job with Dudley. (It still seemed strange that even after the hard reconciliation between the two of them, that both he and Dudley were attracted to Law Enforcement jobs. After so many years of being very different from Dudley, it surprised him that the two of them were so alike.)

It was brutal. His inquiries felt like he was perpetually running in circles: none of the household staff would tell him the truth, the twins (Lorcan and Lysander) decided that neither of them had been in the household that day (and he was sure that there was nowhere else they could be as Hogwarts had sent them home three days previous), he could make neither heads nor tails of his boss's statement, and even less of Luna's little sister that he had no idea existed.

They all told the stories of having business out of the house that day and that only two persons had been at the house during the few hours the murder had taken place. One of these people was Luna Scamander's sister Sol and the other had a significant relationship with the lady of the house that seemed to most of the staff as sexual. (Harry didn't believe this, and figured that the suspect simply had a small crush on her. After all, Luna had been ethereal and utterly too beautiful for her own good that her uniqueness spread over too well.) Luna and this person fought the day before over something that nobody really knew because all that saw it seemed to be too far away to hear anything. Sol Lovegood claimed to have caught the other person beating Luna over the head with the kettle before running out of the front door, then Sol attempted to chat to Harry about fresh-water Plimpies.

And Harry couldn't find the subject to get his statement. The tales seemed to gel too well, which seemed a bit fishy, but the best suspect seemed to have disappeared.

Scamander's assistant, a small looking boy that looked to be a fifteen year old by the name of Xenophilius Amourwell, usually followed Rolf Scamander around like a lost little puppy whenever Scamander showed his face in the office. He reminded Harry of a younger Teddy, but where Teddy had morphed his hair into a light brown because it reminded him of his father—Remus Lupin—young Xenophilius's seemed like they belonged to him. Actually, a lot about the lad reminded Harry more of Remus Lupin than Teddy.

Where Teddy was boisterous and loud in his mischief making, Xenophilius Amourwell seemed to be quiet but Harry caught the boy setting one of Teddy's perpetual whoopie cushions on the Head Auror's seat before a press conference that led to exactly thirteen articles about Scamander's incontinence. And Teddy never allowed anyone else near his prank stockpile, which meant that the lad had probably stolen it. But petty thievery was much different than murder.

"Potter."

Harry sighed, he seemed to be doing that a lot lately. "Rolf, it's two-o-clock in the morning. What does it look like?"

"You better have it on my desk by Monday morning... War-hero or not," Scamander snapped as he moved from Harry's cubicle to the apparation point down the hall in a way that reminded Harry eerily of Professor Snape.

As soon as he was gone, Harry's head hit the table as he groaned at the lack of progress. Why did Amourwell run? It made no sense. If he was indeed involved in the murder, surely an intelligent fifteen year old boy would realize that running would implicate him? Maybe panic had gripped him. But that didn't explain why he hadn't run when he realized Sol Lovegood watched him murder her sister. He curled his hands in his hair as he tried to think even harder why the kid would even murder Luna. And Harry hadn't pegged him as a killer, which was strange as he tended to have a second sense about those things.

Maybe if he had more information, he could find the reason for Amourwell's perceived guilt and more about a child he hadn't really thought about. He'd ask one of the twins as they would probably be closer to Xenophilius's age, and when he could not find a suspect... Asking their peers seemed to be the best option, he'd contact Lysander tomorrow before he returned to Hogwarts; he seemed to be the weaker of the two.

The lights began to dim in the office and Harry supposed that he should probably head home. It was only Friday night, or rather Saturday morning, after all; he could sleep and not think about the case. But the thought of his little home on the edge of London-dark and cold without his family—made him pause. It reminded him a little of Grimauld now that Jamie had joined his siblings at the Burrow as Ginny had gotten to the platform before he did.

A small breath of air issued from his nostrils as he returned to the preliminary reports. They were more style appealing than an empty house.

The sound of a quill scratching idly against parchment echoed through the empty office for the next hour as he recorded all of the statements in order of time. He glanced up at the clock every-so-often to make sure that his children were still where he thought they were (the clock was more advanced than Molly Weasley's that told her more what the children were doing than where—his pinpointed their exact location, for example, James's line said "Burrow- Top Floor, _Bed_ " while Ted's read "Leaky Cauldron- Corner of Bar, _Barstool_ " it was rather more useful) before returning to work.

His hand had just penned the last period of his final statement when the alarm went off. It was shrill against the sudden silence and Harry stared at it briefly as he stretched. He then remembered what it was for, threw down the quill before grabbing his cloak and running at full-speed toward the apparation point where he disappeared with a crack, leaving the office in darkness.


	2. Chapter 2: Intruder at 12 Grimmald Place

The darkness was complete in the early hours. Abomination loved it. This way the only sounds that echoed from the paintings were gentle snores. She sneaked down the stairs toward the first floor where the carpet faded from dust and lack of use, wincing as the drapes over a portrait on the landing before the second floor transitioned from the first moved without a breath of wind. She stopped before it and tilted her head narrowing her eyes.

Would pulling back the curtain make the portrait wake up?

She moved slowly as she approached the resting place of her least favorite portrait; her feet as quiet as a cats paw as she carefully stopped in front of the musty purple hangings. Abomination swallowed as she mustered all of her courage and screwed up her eardrums so that, in case it did wake up the occupant, then she wouldn't be hearing things as if from underwater for the next week.

Her hand tentatively grasped the fabric and pulled it gently from the portrait's face. The snoring jarred a bit as she tucked the curtain slightly behind her frame and held her breath.

A woman sat in her throne, her long fingernails curling subconsciously around the chair's ornate arm rests as her Victorian dress fluttered in a non-existent breeze. Her chest moved slowly up and then down in a rhythmic movement of heartbeat and breath underneath the ringlets of well-styled hair. Abomination had never seen it mussed, though she had seen plenty of paintings that occasionally changed the style of their hair and the woman tended to scream if she was awake, and she wondered idly what she would have to do to make it so. Small curls of breath issued from her mouth like she'd been painted on one cold winter day and blew several of the loose curls around her face into the air over her sharp, delicate cheek bones.

She looked better when she wasn't shouting-when her mouth wasn't open in a maw of darkness, her eyes weren't rolling in her sockets and her face wasn't a horrible shade of puce—Abomination decided as she stared at the paleness of the woman's cheeks. They reminded her of the pearls that her mother used to string up to try to catch the nargles, until the two of them found that the nargles preferred honey over anything else.

She tugged at a strand of her own curly black hair as she wondered what to do now. The logical choice was simply to cover the portrait back up and continue her sneaking down to the kitchen where she could cook the few rats that sat in the bottom of her pocket. This way she could simply relish in not being heard and berated for her very existence AND she could relish in the company of the strange apparitions that had haunted her even before she left.

But... Then again... The woman had screamed at her. Made her feel like she had before she ran... And she swore if she ever felt like that again, it would be with her own consent. She'd also screamed at the apparition that wore her face, and it had killed something inside of her to see the usually cheerful face of Dog (he acted strangely both like one of her father's kennel dogs and the new puppies who always seemed ready to play when she dragged meat from upstairs to their cages in the dungeon, which was her favorite part about being her—that and nothing else seemed to fit, so the nickname would do for now) fall into something that looked like her father's. So, the hag deserved it.

Intellectually, Abomination knew that vengeance didn't satisfy and that—metaphorically speaking—she would have to dig two graves. But she also knew that the look on the hags face when she woke up would be something to witness. She tried to imagine it, but failed.

A grin lit up her face as she realized that perhaps she didn't need to imagine that face... She could simply put it there. She grabbed one of the pony-tails from her wrist, marveled at the contraptions that she had not seen in the first 7 ½ years of her life (that she remembered, and these ones were much softer and squishier than she imagined the other ones being, Dog had laughed a booming bark-laugh when she pulled the bunch of them out of the drawer) before she slipped it around her hair and wrapped it several times around it.

Her hands then brushed the cloak she was wearing with a slight reverence as she remembered who gave it to her—who gave her almost everything. The hand then found its way into her pocket where the menagerie of stolen items congregated. She grasped as she pushed her hand in as far as she could go until she found the paint-brushes that used to belong to her mother.

Abomination's hands worked as quickly and gently as they could, being careful not to wake the portrait's occupant before she finished. A few strokes here and there turned the sleeping Victorian into something resembling one of her female apparitions with ripped clothing, a tank top and several tattoos that read things she'd only heard out of other people's mouths... She assumed that she spelled it incorrectly, but at the moment it didn't seem to matter. In fact, the misspellings probably gave the well painted changes a more accurate representation. After all, the female apparition—for some reason she reminded her of a particularly beautiful Cactus flower with her purple, spiky hair, thus her name became Cacti-in particular didn't seem as intelligent as the others... But perhaps it was simply because she was pining after one of the more dour ones (his was easy, Wolf—it reminded her of the trouble that Dog's nickname caused her and she didn't want to call him "Mongrel" as she was fairly certain that it was bad), the one she wished would laugh more because it made Dog happy... She supposed that she'd need to ask their given names in the future so as not to offend them.

Abomination shook her head slightly as she gave her work a smile before she realized that even if it was painted on, then the paint wouldn't necessarily stick to the canvas where the nasty woman moved and the paint was wet. Maybe, Abomination thought as she placed her hands on the sides of the frame and looked at her work critically, maybe if she used magic the paint would stick.

She took a breath through her nose as she tried to steady herself. It had been a while since she made something happen on purpose. Bad things tended to happen to her if she was caught. A slight panic riled her stomach before she forced it down. Abomination had done worse things to innocent people, why did she feel so sick when finally dishing justice? She muscled down the small amount of sick crawling up her throat, after all, she would have to learn how to use it eventually.

Her hands glowed silver for a brief moment, and there was a slight sucking in on the portrait as the magic moved through the old canvas and synced with the movements of the woman's voluptuous chest. She still breathed in that strange manner—a wheezy inhale followed almost immediately by the deepest snore that she'd heard since Dog fell asleep three hours earlier (with a snore so distinctive, Abomination found herself certain that the two were related)-and her eyes were still glued shut. She let out a breath she hadn't been aware of holding as she let the curtain flutter down over the woman's face.

Satisfaction flooded through her as she felt the tingling aftershocks of doing something with magic. It felt wonderful. It felt like she was finally free.

A small giggle issued from her mouth as she snuck down the rest of the stairs toward the kitchen. Her bare feet thumped on the main floor of the house after jumped the upturned umbrella stand that looked like a troll's foot and immediately felt something wrong. Abomination tried to move toward the thick door on the other side of the hall but her feet couldn't move, they stood stuck to the floor and she thought she heard a faint alarm echoing through the house. Panic began to fog her brain. She needed to move. Her hands pulled at her legs as a deafening crack issued on the outside of the door she hadn't tried to get to.

Abomination knew that sound. That sound meant trouble, specifically that she was in it. A buzz traveled down to her feet that felt as if they'd sunken into the heavy black floor and suddenly the force holding her down no longer cemented itself to her feet. She scrambled up to the painting's landing but paused as curiosity made her stay to see who had done the pop.

The second door swung open and the intruder forced his way over the threshold feeling the old spells that had somehow linked to the building—all of which scared the hell out of Abomination, not that she would ever admit it—and she saw a rather skinny man whose mess of untamed hair looked like Pony Boy (Dog's best friend besides Wolf-both canines laughed hysterically when Pony Boy let out an unmanly squeak when she'd first called him that) but the hollows in his eyes made him look like a monster coming for her soul.

"And monsters scream at my approach," she thought as a smirk passed across her face. Abomination looked up toward the staircase where Dog had helped her set booby traps (she thought that it was the only time he'd genuinely smiled since they'd gotten here).

The man stared at her form for several minutes, glancing from her bare toes to the thick coat whose sleeves reached several inches past the tips of her fingertips which had been pushed up past her elbows. His mouth slowly dropped open as he caught a glimpse of her face. Abomination took a mental deep breath to calm the rapidly hammering heart as she recognized the stylized "A" stitched meticulously on his robes—an Auror (a dark wizard catcher for the uninitiated) can sense fear far better than a Werewolf, her father always told her as he cast her into the depths of his murky shadow—before giving him a cheeky grin. His eyes widened as she gave him the little finger wave she'd seen from Dog.

And then he was moving. _Perfect._ He ran straight toward her, but missed the first stair as his back foot hit the very solid troll's leg and landing with a much louder thunk that woke the hag behind her. Abomination cast a glance over her shoulder as she started to run and the woman started to scream about "horrid half-bloods, and blood-traitor kin that befouled the Noble House of Black" without looking down at her new get-up. She cackled with each foot making as little noise as a specter trying to sneak through a wall as she bounded up three of the flights of stairs. Abomination stopped just out of the range of sight to watch the man follow her up the stairs.

He gallumphed up the first twelve—as loud as a Runespore charging a Snorkack hunter—before he hit the first obstacle. Triggered of course by a singular button hidden in the patchwork of the carpet (her idea), a large barrel materialized at the top of the third flight and began to bounce on its way down. Oddly, the man didn't notice the sounds of the sloshing barrel over the shrieks coming from the hag painting. Abomination almost felt remorse at siccing the obnoxious gargoyle on him before daring to capture or distract him from finding her. Droplets of potion leaked out of one of the holes and flung floating orbs of water into the atmosphere. They caught the man's attention as the barrel ran into his legs and threw him down a flight of stairs where he lay staring angrily at the screaming woman as if this was all her fault.

He muttered something that sounded like "I hate Rue-Goldberg machines," as the orbs crashed together in a blasting symphony of the 1812 overture as colored paints thrashed against the walls with a blinding cache of light. The man blinked slightly at the cacophony before climbing the stairs again, two at a time. He almost made it to Abomination's hiding spot before his hand hit a button and the stairs turned into a slide. Unfortunately, it didn't work as it was supposed to and the Auror's fingers caught the edge of the slide before swinging his leg over and onto the landing.

Abomination squeaked slightly before trying to dash into the dark bowels of the house. She was too late, his arms clinched around her waist with a frustrated grunt as she kicked him in the closest place she could before a loud pop echoed through the house.


End file.
